Child, moving over near the American, curiously watches him at his writing. At last the little one sits soberly down beside the war correspondent, who smiles at him but goes on rapidly scribbling his notes:
While up from the Lido’s calm,
Where the yellow sails once sank
Into gold dusted sky;
Where the great green waves crashed on
The lilac shadowed sands,
Grey tides move like a dirge.
Young waters that once lapped
The dream-lanes of canals,
Where marble faces smiled
In shadows green as moss,
Now are wrinkled and old;
The morning-tinted shores
Are now brittle and old;
And here, where on festa days
The banners clasped the breeze,
And the tapestries rolled down
Over the galleries,
And the air-ships, like great beads,
Buoyed them on the sun
Floating over the roofs,
Those days, fanning with sails
And fairy trails of boats,
And somnolent dip of oars—
Those nights, fruited with lights
Spattered with gleam and gold—
All are ended and gone,
Blasted before the guns.
Venetian people are gone,
Fled to Bologna’s plains,
Away from Piave’s floods
To Padua’s pallid walls.
The decadent boom of guns—
Sullen, brutish guns—
Tired, moody guns—
Sick, disillusioned guns—
Is all that comes to the ear.
The child, sitting placidly near the war correspondent, keeps on throwing the tiny crumbs of bread to the pigeons; the American looks at him absently, and then bends again to his writing:
Glutted are all the guns,
Glutted with fiendish drink
Of hot young human blood;
Brutal ennuyeux! Fat
With soft delicious food
Brought them from every land.
Now the very guns are shamed;
The hideous tanks are shamed;
The fields and mountains are shamed;
The Zeppelins are shamed;
The submarines are shamed;
Men’s faces are set and stern
With an solemn awful shame.
The world turns from its trough,
And knows its swinishness;
The guns are glutted now,
Yet, if the flood be passed
On Piave’s fertile plains,
Venice shall come to their maw;
All the delicate high-bred bones
Of the Bride of the Seas will come
To be crunched by the wild-boar guns
Venice the fragile, grey
Queen of the lamped lagoons—
Of slender lily tower—
Of rich dustcovered bronze—
Of history-crusted stone—
Of luminous Christs and saints
And Gods of golden lands—
Of dreaming palace and port—
Of wingèd winy glass
And vine-hung water-gate—
Venice must go to the guns.
The war correspondent closes his book; getting wearily to his feet he walks around the corner of the Palazzo Giustizia and gazes out on the Grand Canal toward the lagoons. He turns and looks sorrowfully toward the Bridge of Sighs, to the restored Campanile and the Procurate Nuova. The grey pigeons whirl around him; the child follows him.
Child looking earnestly at the American, points to the doves:
(Child, singing:)
There go the doves, the flowers of the water—
Leaves of the steeples and seed of the sea;
They know never our commerce nor barter,
Yet the doves are no longer free.
All of their flight among starry steeples
Fanning of wings over militant peoples,
Brings us no harmony.
Yet the work of the pigeons is not done,
For the work of wings is never done.
American looking down at the child wonderingly:
The work of wings is never done.
That, me-thinks, is a wise small song.
Who gave it you to sing?